Hi sorry if this is a FAQ, I’ve done some searching and haven’t found anything. As a Terraform user who’s new to Pulumi, I’m surprised to see that the graph of my stack has only two levels. There’s just the stack, and then it depends on every other resource. And in the graph I don’t see any relationships between any of the resources. This is surprising to me because Terraform automatically registers the relationships (dependencies) between resources and then renders a more useful graph. Am I missing something?

I think the graph you are seeing is driven by the

parent

property, not resource dependencies. Pulumi is smart enough to deploy in the order that dependencies require (and I think if you look in the state file you'll see those dependencies) but by default each resource's

parent

is the top-level

Stack

resource unless provided otherwise - and I think that's the graph you're seeing

Interesting.

Usually you only use the

parent

property inside component resources. The vast majority of users are able to do what they need to do inside the

Stack

constructor or inside the initial pulumi delegate, and never make use of component resources. So it seems like a lot of work has been done to cater to the most common use-case. For instance the

Stack

constructor doesn't make you call

RegisterOutputs(...)

, or like you said, it doesn't make you pass the

parent

. But as soon as you make a component resource you take on the responsibility for that functionality and have to do

parent: this,

and remember to call

.RegisterOutputs(..)

That’s helpful context, thank you!

awesome! Yea I'd wager that the graph you're seeing during deployment is just limited by what they can draw in a console while still being read-able, so they chose to just do the parent/child tree.

That makes sense. I think in my particular project, that graph will be more useful when I reorganize it into components.

any particular reason why

parent

cannot automatically be inferred from the dependency graph?

I can't say for sure since I didn't write it, we could maybe ask someone that might be able to give a more informed answer - but a resource can have more than 1 dependency so how would the pulumi engine know which one to choose? I think they're just different concepts. One is a logical grouping mechanism and the other is like a practical or physical grouping

Hey all, quick bit of info on this topic The parent property is cosmetic only. It does not affect the dependency graph in anyway, it only updates the console output to make things look prettier. The dependency graph is all managed in state with inputs and outputs. If you need explicitly dependencies, you’d use dependsOn

So the console output then is not a dependency graph, just a visual of parent/child relationships?

Yeah if you want to see the dependency graph you can use the

pulumi stack graph

command https://www.pulumi.com/docs/reference/cli/pulumi_stack_graph/

Sweet. Honestly it wasn't a difference I had thought about until @fierce-holiday-69805 brought it up

if i specify

depends_on

, does it override automatically inferred dependencies or just augment them?

Yeah… I tried once to make the console graph more like the dependency graph and realized that it spirals out of hand very quickly and is most certainly not a one-day-hack-job kinda project 😂